Paper short abstract:

Widely credited as the originator of the "culture" concept, E.B. Tylor nevertheless occupies a distant ancestral position in anthropology. Less well known is that his book was almost called Primitive Civilisation and that he used the terms civilisation and culture synonymously and interchangeably.

Paper long abstract:

Marcel Mauss visited E.B. Tylor in Oxford in 1898 and later claimed to be his disciple. Mauss went on to write that 'The best collections informing on the distribution of ethnographic objects are undoubtedly those of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which E.B. Tylor founded and which Henry Balfour administers.' This paper will consider whether by engaging with Mauss and the French tradition, in relation to the study of civilization, we may also be indirectly engaging with the older pre-Malinowskian tradition of Victorian Anthropology. This tradition placed the museum at the centre of the work of Anthropology. This paper consider the role Tylor imagined for the museum in the study of Civilization and whether this is a role that these institutions are still equipped to fulfill.

This paper will explore what Tylor meant by the term civilisation and how it was articulated in relation to the questions that he thought Anthropology could answer. It will also consider the implications of Stocking's suggestion that Tylor's adoption of the term "culture" owed much to the publication of Matthew Arnold's polemical work Anarchy and Culture. Tylor's tended to pluralise neither term, and this singular and global outlook poses a challenge to contemporary discourse which has increasingly spoken of cultures and civilisations. Tylor's global and historical vision was one that allowed archaeological and anthropological resources to be brought together in an attempt to answer a set of questions about the place of humans in the world.